How to contact the Xbox trust and safety / wordfilter team

PoofyGummy · May 18, 2022

Support was useless so far, and there really seems to be an error in their wordfiltering algorithm.

It's about my name/gamertag. I dunno about you, but I think it would make one think of marshmallow candies and stuff, and I like both soft puffy and bouncy things. It's clearly non-offensive.
Additionally it was allowed in my name, profile name, forum name, and email-address by microsoft, and i've registered multiple microsoft products under it, so clearly they don't think it's offensive either.

Now, the policies on what's considered offensive in gamertags are sweeping, so looking things up today it turned out that "poof" is/was also used as an obscure british slang term for gay.
The thing is: "poof" is not blocked from being used in gamertags.
Gamertags with "poof" in it are allowed both old and new, so clearly it is not considered relevant by the wordfilter team.

"poofy" however is blocked for some reason, even though there's absolutely no way it could be considered offensive when "poof" is not. But some people still have gamertags with that in it, so this is inconsistent too. So there is clearly a mistake of some sort afoot. Maybe a bug.

I would really like to use the microsoft account I've been using for a long time for gaming too, but with support being unhelpful, there's no info on how to contact the wordfilter team, to respectfully notify them of the error.
So any idea how to contact them?

:)

PoofyGummy

So the "report a bug" thing was actually available outside of that under "feedback hub", but your suggestion lead me to finding that. Thank you!

Ricardo Lechuga

Hi PoofyGummy! My name is Ricardo an independent advisor ready to help you with this situation!

Is not possible to contact them, and is not possible to change the filtering system also support can't change it, there can be some gamertags that still contains this words because, maybe, at the moment of the creation that word wasn't added yet

Note that Microsoft can at any time deem a gamertag harmful or inappropriate (even if the “Change gamertag” tool allows it to be created), and they can change that gamertag without warning.

Xbox does have a suggestion feature called Idea Hub that you can use to share any new idea that you would like to see implemented in the future

https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxinsiders/wiki/ideas/

Ricardo Lechuga

That's a 12 years old post, and if you notice, it doesn't mentioned anything about they reported a bug, but that the mayor of that town got involved, so probably also involved some legal matters because the account was banned and was affecting the user

In this case is different, your account hasn't been banned and you wanna try to change something in the system, that's why the Xbox Idea hub exist

PoofyGummy

It has to be possible to contact them to report a bug somehow

I don't want to "share an idea".

I want to report an error to the policy and enforcement team.

Other people have done it before. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/microsoft-apologizes-to-fort-gay-for-xbox-live-ban/

I haven't been banned so it's not possible do it through the case review option.

PoofyGummy

In that case, the enforcement people are the ones who unbanned the account. And the head of Policy and Enforcement even gave a statement.

In my case support only mentioned that the word is actually filtered. The fact that it is, and only on that service, while its source-word isn't, is a bug or oversight. And there was a second bug relating to the account creation process, which is also a bit too complex to get into.

Using an external platform to contact a tech company is
The insider hub app is a great suggestion, since that allows for bug reports! I'll try it! Thank you!

How to contact the Xbox trust and safety / wordfilter team